January Meeting Follow-up

We had a great meeting last night with a pretty full house and quite a few new faces. We started the night off with the Q&A where we had a couple good questions regarding when to go from HD to SD for delivery and one on editing video from a Flip camera in Final Cut. Our open mic session was dominated by Apple's newly announced iPad. I told a couple people I wasn't going to talk about it much yet, but I have a hard time stopping once I get started.

Our main topic of the evening was presented by Silver Platter Productions' Bernie Mitchell, who gave us the low down on the AVCHD format and two of Panasonic's cameras that shoot to that format - the AG-HMC150 and the AG-HMC40. He passed around the HMC150 and we all got a good lesson on video compression and the wide array of video formats.

After a short break, I showed a couple quick and simple tips & tricks - using the "<" and the ">" keyboard shortcuts in Final Cut and exporting your video as an image sequence, whether it be an image for each frame or just a few for your entire clip. Next up was a demo of Digital Anarchy's Beauty Box and Red Giant's Magic Bullet Mojo. I thought this was an interesting pairing of plug-ins, as both are based on the premise of making skin look good. They both do a good job of what they were created to do.

We finished the evening off by giving away nearly $1300 worth of items provided by our generous sponsors, whose names you'll see just over there to the right in the sidebar.

I was so impressed by Philip Bloom's video of Skywalker Rancher shot on the Canon 5D Mark II and 7D cameras, we screened it a couple times as people were heading out the door. If you haven't seen it yet, check it out now. If you have any interest at all in shooting video on DSLR cameras, his blog is a must read. 

January Meeting Details

I have some details on what we'll be covering at our January meeting that takes place Thursday. Our main speaker will be Bernie Mitchell, a rep for Panasonic. He'll be covering Panasonic's AVCHD codec and it's advantages. I'll follow up by demoing 2 plugins for Final Cut - Digital Anarchy's Beauty Box and Red Giant's Mojo. We'll of course have plenty of time to network, as well as a Q&A session for any issues you've been having lately.

Hopefully we'll see you there!

December Meeting Follow-Up

It was a small group on a cold December night, but a very happy group at the end of the night. We gave away almost $4100 worth of items, including $1599 in credit to Artbeats as part of our special contest with them. Everyone went home with something as Artbeats, one of our newest sponsors, also provided us with gifts for all of the attendees.

Our main speaker wasn't able to make it, so we used the time to look at some of the effects and transitions included in the GenArts Sapphire plug-in. We gave away not only two free months of rental of Sapphire, but we also gave away a license for the full package!

Our next meeting will take place on January 28, 2010. Keep an eye here on our website as well as our Twitter feed for details of the meeting.

I hope you have a great holiday season! Keep warm and we'll see you in January!

Contest to Win $1599 Worth of Artbeats Footage!

Our newest sponsor Artbeats is kicking things off with us by giving you the opportunity to win $1599 worth of Artbeats stock footage of your choice. If you want to win, you're going to have to work a little for it. Here's what you need to do:

- Print out this pdf

- Go to the Artbeats website and find the clip that is pictured in the pdf using your best guesses at associated keywords.

- Fill in the name of the clip and your name in the form area in the pdf.

- Bring the form to our next meeting, currently scheduled for Thursday December 10th. All entries with the correct clip name will be put in a hat, from which one winning entry will be pulled.

So it's really not that hard. To be eligible to win, you must be present at our next meeting, and you must be a member of our group at the time of our drawing. All you have to do to accomplish that is click the "Sign Me Up" link over there in the left column.

While you're over on the Artbeats website, you might want to join in on their main Scavenger Hunt contest, where they are giving away over $40,000 worth of footage and prizes, including a 17" MacBook Pro.

Good Luck!

October Meeting Follow-up

Updated 10-23-09 2:04pm: Uploaded and added link to Hitchcock Storyboard pdf.

A special thanks to John Pinella who brought in his recently acquired Red ONE camera for us to take a look at. Also a special thanks out to our sponsors: Gen Arts (our newest sponsor), Noise Industries, Crowd Control, Peach Pit Press, Focal Press, Duncan Video, and our generous hosts at FOX59.

My keynote presentation is now available to download from our Downloads Page. The .pdf file has live links directly to the iTunes Store for the iPhone applications I talked about last night.

The storyboard created using the iPhone app Hitchcock is also available to download from our Downloads Page.

A couple other things we talked about:

   - The new V/DSLR cameras that Nikon and Canon recently introduced. We showed Vincent Laforet's video "Nocturne" which was shot with the Canon 1D Mark IV courtesy of Stu Maschwitz's YouTube sight (Stu worked on the video as well). You can read about the details behind the shoot on Vincent's blog and Stu's blog. I also mentioned that Laforet will be in Muncie on November 3 at the Civic Center. You can get info and purchase tickets at Jack's Camera website. 

   - Apple released new iMacs this week that look to be a significant bump over previous additions. The high end iMac uses the same quad-core processor that the Mac Pro's use, and also allows up to 16GB of RAM now. Throw in a new 27" LED screen with the same horizontal resolution of the 30" Cinema Display, and it should make for a pretty computer. They also released a new mouse, Magic Mouse. It is essentially a multi-touch aware two button mouse. One downside - as of now it looks like there is no support for a middle mouse button click, which could be problematic when working in Color or other apps (such as 3D apps). 

After a raffle of some items provided by our sponsors, we called it a night. Be sure to keep an eye here on the website for next month's meeting details. It will be taking place Dec. 10 due to the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays.